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Comment by kvdveer | Hacker News Reader

The same way laws against online piracy are enforced: attack the infrastructure. AdBlock Plus is being attacked right now. If distributing this software is made illegal, all blockers will vanish from the addon stores, and only very tech savvy users will have palatable Internet.

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Your comment just made me realize how easy it would actually be for a court to implement such a ban these days: They could simply require Apple to not ship a content blocking API anymore in their jurisdiction. Thanks to Apple's ban of third-party browsers, that would be enough.

On Android, the situation is slightly better, since browsers can be sideloaded, but ad blockers would quickly become a niche phenomenon.

Easy to forget, but some of us still browse the web on laptops and desktop computers where users still have slightly more choice when it comes to what software to use. For now. Of course eventually Google or someone else will manage to spread something like Web Environment Integrity Checks, and then things will become a lot messier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

That's me lol! I never use the internet on my phone for anything, unless mine here goes out.

The mozilla devs were warned that mandatory addon signing and code verification turns them into the main arbiter which extensions may exist and thus a legal target. They insisted that for the sake of security it must be done anyway.

The spirits that I called...

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